


pilot's log

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gaslighting, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 11:06:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12107379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: He is a risk, and Shiro needs better. This is the least of what he can give.





	pilot's log

**Author's Note:**

> fair warning: while i've labeled this keith/shiro, the original/unbrainwashed(?)/actual shiro does not appear in it.

"All right. Turn your back to me."

At once, Keith turns. His hands pull along the bed's pale edge, anchoring, obedient; his heels thud onto the floor. A palm curves over his shoulder; it skims the crest of a shoulder blade and down his spine, stops where the bones lock rigid in their chain.

"Cold?" Shiro says.

 _Yes_ snaps through him. Each of the castle rooms still shelters a little of the cryopod's cool, tight as a held breath, adrift with the wintering heartbeat of a creature stirring but not quite awake. But it's not just a question—it's a sigh, _Shiro's_ sigh, all relief and quiet satisfaction at the end of a long day. His exhaust feathers against Keith's nape with each breath, the kind of felt slow burn that chars any bigger thought into ashen shivering. 

"I'm fine," Keith says, as his fingers flex along the sheets. "Did you find that, uh. Stylus?"

A chime sings out in answer: steel joints fumbling to pinch a glassy stem. "Right where I left it," Shiro says. He touches Keith's naked back with the same care; his fingerpoints burn in fever-flashes. "The Uskorians may have been allies of Altea back in the day, but based on the records, they used these to mark prisoners. I know it hurts, Keith, so you have to tell me if it's more than you can take—"

"It's _not_."

Already he's knotting his hair from his nape; his shoulders sharpen against Shiro's murmuring. He knows the drill. There's no point in taking it slow.

"All right," Shiro says again, wry and resigned. "I'm going to adjust the power. Let me know when it's right."

The stylus' tooth digs against his skin, charging; its hum burns low as a banked fire. Keith sets his teeth. He waits as static flares through his veins, as its prickle thickens into a fang, as its slavering electricity throbs and brightens through his temples—

"That's enough," he grits. At once the buzz drops away; the charge jumps back into the ghost of a sting.

"I don't want to hurt you," Shiro says, quiet, like it's any kind of answer.

"It's not going to help anyone if you can't read what you're writing, Shiro."

A thumb smoothes and soothes the jut of a shoulder blade. "It also kind of defeats the point," Shiro remarks, "if you're going to second-guess me through this whole process."

"I wasn't—"

But a kiss cuts him off as his head snaps back, an easy smear. "It's fine," Shiro says, all rue. "Just—stay quiet for the next part, all right? Not that you're doing anything wrong—but you can get pretty distracting when you're loud."

 _Distracting_. His jutting frown sheathes itself; his lashes flicker, settling. Keith turns forward again. "Sure you're not just easy to distract?"

"Only when it comes to you." The stylus draws its first line, point to point. A tendon jumps between his shoulder blades and slackens again under a thumb's idling circle. "I know that this has to hurt. Just hold still. For me."

Blunted sensation presses over the backs of his eyes like a lens, blurry before it runs clear. He blinks once, deliberate. He's had worse. He's used to this. He can take it. "It's not that bad," Keith says, after his voice steadies. "Tell me what you're writing."

"Right, here. _Pilot log—2-27. Oreispa. R. 3H. S._ "

Line by line, the day's work settles into his veins, nettling and electric, the buzz of it stitching into his skin. _2-27_ , for the month and twenty-seven days since they'd found a battered Galra scoutship drifting mute through the stars. _R_ for _retrieval_ : surprising no one, ten thousand years has given the Galra's generals and bureaucrats more than time enough to map out a routine of confiscation and ransoms, both Empire-endorsed and not. Planet after planet entering the new Coalition's come pleading to Voltron for help in recovering their artifacts. In this case, Allura explained, the retrieval'd be as much to Voltron's advantage as their ally's: Oreispa, a blue-dwarf world spinning on the brink of the civilised systems, devotes significant resources to firing self-sustaining navigational satellites out to space. Confiscating the local points of reference for mapping and calculating spaceflights, the Galra had isolated half their galaxy.

The mission itself had gone in the usual way: a space-battle, spinning with lasers. Shattering the shields of a gold-striped destroyer. Swinging the Black Lion down through the gathered fleet, open bait while Lance and Allura raced to pluck Oreispa's three hostage engineers from Galra holding— _3H_. They'd formed Voltron while the engineers rewired and fired every satellite from the enemy's hangar, striking down dreadnoughts and corvette-ships alike as Galra soldiers angled to take the launch missiles down—

But scrawling all that onto his back would char him black in weeks. War begs for simplifying. It's how these things work.

His head sinks, just slow enough to give Shiro time to work around the flex of his nape, the muscle shifting under his stretching fingers. Spacefire burns beneath his eyelids. The battlefield had reeled in shocks and flashes: debris snapping reflections, mines bursting, a chain of ships whirling together, sliding lasers-cannons from their bellies as they spun over the Castle of Lions into a steel-thorned crown.

 _S_ for—

" _Success_ ," Keith says, and bites down the hiss. "Those ships broke through the castle shields, Shiro. They had a scout ready to _take_ you."

Shiro's laugh breaks against his nape, low and fond, an impact that thrums warm down to his bones. "Well, you took care of the entire fleet before the scout deployed. I'd say that was more than good enough."

"The castle shouldn't have been anywhere near the line of fire."

"I had to find a distraction. You were about to break formation with Pidge. If that convoy'd gotten between you, you wouldn't have been able to form Voltron before the engineers could get away."

"I had an _angle_. Maybe it was a risk, but—"

"Don't tense up. You're going to distort the line."

Keith breathes out, a harsh slight gust. His palms rattle the bedsprings, then still.

But the stylus doesn't move: its needlepoint rests where it's sunk, a black star prickling a vein. "You must be pretty tired," Shiro says. "Let's—take this a little faster than usual. I'm going to move the setting up to the next level. Try and keep yourself distracted. Do you want me to talk you through it?"

 _Talk you through it_.

He isn't thinking, and then he is, as memory turns over like a coal in the pit of his belly. He'd been clumsy at first, marrows churning hot and leaden by turns under the stylus's brittle burn, his heels snagging along the floor. Grit-spined with the mattress's dip as Shiro knelt behind him, tensing through every adjustment on the stylus, each scrap of praise that brushed and shivered into his ear. The way his breath laced into knots when Shiro leaned over, _this is good, Keith—you're being good for me right now, aren't you,_ as his fingers wrapped around Keith's wrist, unsteady, balancing together, guiding him through the first slow pull down his cock.

He's gotten better, log by log. He doesn't need Shiro's touch to work himself over anymore.

One hand knuckles against the bed. The zipper snaps down in the silence. At once, another laugh flickers against his shoulder. "Don't unbutton just yet," Shiro says. "I want you to touch yourself—but keep it over the cloth for now. Can you do that?"

He can, but there's a difference. Friction's one thing when it's Shiro's fingers anchoring him. It's another to be left to his own hands and shallowing breaths, to spread legs like he's claiming seats on a train, conscious of the weight behind him, all brushing fingertips and silence. His head sways, quick and jarring; Keith stares at the far wall as his palm presses between his legs, a heel-hard meaningless pressure.

The stylus strokes cold down his back, a cat's-scratch flare lacing skin. "I keep forgetting," Shiro says, in that husky, patient voice. "Your back goes so tight when you're just starting out."

It's a reminder in its own way, coded and sidelong. His grip knuckles over the sheeting. Keith grits down a breath and loosens it; his shoulders roll slack with the exhale. "I told you I was fine."

The stylus' hum marks his only answer.

Habit saves him where thinking never has. Stroke after stroke builds into rhythm, a dull throb that saps at his pulse, a clouding heat that roils down into bone with each slow, grinding roll of his palm. Only Shiro's touch breaks the haze: fingers holding sure as cage-bars along his shoulder, speckling cool points over skin. His eyes lid; his head tips back on a sigh.

"You're almost making me feel guilty here."

"What?" Keith says, too slow—but the question cracks into a shudder as Shiro answers him in the same moment: "I didn't say stop, Keith, take it _harder_." The stylus digs in, and shock crooks his fingers along cloth in obedient reflex, jerking into a hard burst of friction. He chokes out a gasp.

"Yeah," Shiro says, lower. The stylus-point eases up; the etching flows back like a circuit closing. "That sounds a lot better. Keep it slow. I don't want you to make this any harder on you than it—"

"I'd do a lot more than this to make sure you're _okay_."

"I know. I just wish you didn't have to go this far. That's all." 

"You trust me." He bites out each word; his veins throb with them, raw on impact and promise. "I'm pretty sure that's not a bad thing."

A laugh fires like a stylus-stroke into the thin air. "Some days," Shiro says, too soft, "it feels like you're the only thing I can trust."

 _You're the one thing that's never changed on me, Keith. I know you—_ but that's an awful echo, a whipcrack reel of images: Shiro, scrubby with beard and his hair swaying around his ghoul-thin face in rags, crumpling as he keeled out of the cockpit of his stolen Galra flyer; Shiro, sunk into bed with his face pressed into a hand; Shiro with ink smeared down his wrist like a long scar, scrabbling and clawing at the caged lurid lights of his steel arm—

"We're almost done. You're doing really well," Shiro says, and it's worse than friction, the way his voice sinks for the words, all fine-tuned gentleness like he's thinking about nothing else but pulling Keith onto him, dragging them flush together. "Dig your fingers in for me."

Reflex again: his grip curls before thought plucks tendon. For a heartbeat's flare, he thinks of a larger hand wrapping over his knuckles, a thumb gliding down the edge of his palm as he pulls through a real stroke, Shiro rocking with his shiver—

"I should get a mirror in here one of these days."

The image shivers, shatters—and then he's back on the bed's edge, half-hard with one hand down the messy, rucked-open gap of his trousers, breath after breath churning to lead in his lungs. "Why—a _mirror_."

"You don't make that much sound when you're touching yourself. It's hard to get a good sense of how you're feeling from back here. And besides," Shiro kisses his shoulder. "I like looking at you."

Heat's a coil in the pit of his stomach, tensing, untouched. He'd lost count lines back, whispers back, and his trousers are tight around his hips, the thickening pulse of his cock. He can't do more than this—tilt his hips up, knot and knuckle his fist—not when Shiro's still kneeling inches back, fingers splayed over skin. He _can't_ , and the fine grit of restraint's scraping him raw.

"Hold still."

His wrist jerks; his knuckles grind against the comforter. The stylus bristles where it's stopped against his back. "Shiro," Keith grates, and it's nearly a whine.

Shiro's mouth tilts through the quiet, a ringing sweet curve. "Patience, remember? It's not that much longer, Keith. I'd hate to have to draw this twice."

He holds and holds. His lungs ache; his toes curl against the floor. He counts off, line by line, holding with his fingers stiff against the impulse to crook and clench, give himself some relief as Shiro keeps talking behind him in the same warm, thoughtful voice.

"Ever since I came back, it's been hard to know what to think. Even my memory is—" but he pulls back, skirting the brink of a dangerous thought. "Believe me: I know I'm asking you for more than I should. You shouldn't have to do this just to keep me stable. But you always come through for me, Keith—you're something I know I can trust. I don't think I tell you enough how much I appreciate that."

It's worse to listen to Shiro without being able to look at him—without the sight of his clear dark eyes to distract from the husky promise of his voice. Keith shuts his eyes, bites down against a white flurry of sparks along the lids. "You don't have to," he says, just to cut through the circuit that _appreciation_ sets thrumming down his spine. "That's not why I'm doing it."

"I'm the one who's getting the benefits," Shiro murmurs. "Your reasons don't matter that much." But the stylus keeps its place, a salt-prickling sting where it clings to bone. "We really aren't moving fast enough. Can you work yourself a little faster?"

"I'll mess up the lines—"

"Don't worry about that." A steel hand closes along his hip; a kiss skims up shoulder and throat, brushing the edge of his pulse before it cuts short on an exhale and a flicker of wet pressure, so lingering that Keith groans with it. "I'll handle it. But—do you really," Shiro says, awkward and intent, "want me to walk you through it? Tell you to work your pants open—just a little more. Tighten your grip. Keep working over the head just a little longer, yeah, just like that—"

It's the same voice that's always told him to _remember to run through the mnemonic for preflight checks_ or _manage your fuel_ , a familiar tone pitched low, and he's tugging and dragging at cloth even as Shiro talks, wrapping his hand around his cock and closing _tight_ in time to match the hitching, filthy cadence as Shiro's fingertips dig into his skin. He's rougher than he should be, maybe, going too fast—but the first sheer shock of sensation's worth it for the felt snag at the back of Shiro's throat—the way the next electric stroke cuts short as Shiro leans in to smear a kiss along the jut of Keith's nape, to press _good_ into his skin, a murmur that curls static through every vein.

He says, "Almost," but Keith's panting already, slow breaths stringing one after another by the time Shiro's palm spreads over his hip, a warm anchor. His cock aches, slick and darkening where he's half-grinding it between stomach and hand. "You're just about close enough. Hold yourself—right there."

" _Shiro_ —"

"Just do it. I've _got_ you," Shiro says, a ruthless override, and there's conviction burning beneath it: the raw, aching haze of his back and marrows distilled into a known quantity, measurable to Shiro's brimming-bright eyes, calculated just to the brink of what he can take.

Conscious and obedient, Keith holds—holds as the last few sparks stitch along his shoulder's slope, holds against a shudder as his fist clenches, as the stylus clicks _off_ into a silence like an eclipse.

"Finally," Shiro says.

It's almost a signal. Adrenaline flares into color, and image after impulse comes crowding through Keith's skull. He could push Shiro down, grating down the ache in favor of slinging a leg over his hips, rocking against him; he could tumble off the bed, bite at Shiro's stomach while he snapped open his belt—

"That," he says, "took you a while."

Shiro smiles, a resounding curl. "It's worth it, though. My handwriting's not that bad this time. Want me to read the last entry out to you? It's still right here."

He's tracing a line just under Keith's left shoulderblade, and heat sweeps out wherever his steel fingers land. Salt burns at the backs of his teeth, livid with memory, with the last time those fingers had braced his thighs apart, dug into the bend of his knee to pin his leg back against the bed, cock rubbing against him all rough and slow before Shiro'd fucked into him.

But this isn't about that.

"I know what you wrote," Keith says, in a ragged spill. "Shiro, just—tell me what you remember."

"Honestly? Not much."

His exhale stutters. "Are you serious?"

But the touch drags on, skimming over his spine to the row where the latest entry's settling in raw, thickening beats—Keith shivers with the cool relief of metal over ink. "Relax, Keith. I just spent a lot of time looking at you. It's hard to remember anything else."

A thumb keeps its place between vertebrae, a quiet anchor. His tension unspools by inches under its faint weight. "I didn't do much on that one."

"Don't undersell yourself. I know it's not easy for you to stay under control. And you've been helping a lot on our missions, too, when you've stayed on task. " He's winding through the old black letters as he talks, an idle cartography: _2-16. Caphobi. Q. 20H. S._ "I remember—the head of Caphobi's diplomatic mission invited Voltron to tour the city and feast with them after we brought their hostages home. On the whole walk, I kept thinking that we were really lucky they looked like they ate the same kind of food that we did. Of course, then I realized they didn't use any utensils.

"You, though. You looked like you were enjoying the meal, even if it was kind of a mess. I thought I saw you looking at me a few times. You had that sauce on your fingers, and when you saw me, you just got kind of this—look. And for the rest of the feast, the only thing I could think about," Shiro says, idle and conversational, "was how much easier it'd be if we could take a break, so that I could suck your hands clean and fuck you up against the wall. Right outside the feast hall."

Keith swallows. Sensation's parsing in flashes: the stylus-marks still muzzy in their raw stretch, the throb caught in the base of his spine, Shiro's fingers spidering over his waist in a transparent tease.

He twists back—nearly snaps an elbow into Shiro's chest as he surges for it. But Shiro's grip closes over his hips, securing, and then they're kissing at last, a fast and reckless crush like a claim, a challenge, an open demand.

A palm snaps against Shiro's shoulder, and Shiro breathes out in a slick, splintering mess of shudder before he hauls Keith back with him. Across the bed they roll, a wreck of adrenaline and tangling limbs, rolling their hips together in a jumble, a ruthless, feverish grind. He was hard before the stylus finished its last stroke; now his whole body sings to the satisfaction of Shiro's weight against him, proximity and perfect friction at last. Keith drops onto white sheets and jostling springs as Shiro braces over him—spares one breath before he's clawing, scrabbling at the vest's taut, stupid tangle as he groans into the kiss.

A smile crooks against his mouth.

"No," Shiro says. "Not this time."

He flips Keith against the bed—pins his hip there while Keith squirms under friction-worked steel gone warm as skin. In a little miracle, his trousers get kicked off somewhere in the tumult between Shiro's tugs and his grim arching, peeling it off his thighs as he scrabbles along the sheets.

In spite of the wait, the summer-red heat rising off his skin, Shiro stays _slow_ : vest and shirt and sleek trousers rumpled but clinging, his thumb sliding down the wing-fine slope of a shoulder, palming over the new mark as if to bruise it darker. "Kneel," he says, and the word, the low ragged _sound_ of him, cracks a groan through Keith's teeth. "Bring your hips up a little—for me."

Keith listens, first and sure and always—scrambles onto his knees just as Shiro's hand closes around his cock. It's too much after a long wait, and his head snaps down, shadows flinching beneath his eyelids, _gasping_ in gutted pulls as Shiro pulls up through a lazy stroke. Rhythm doesn't take long. They know each other by now, and Shiro knows just when to wring his fingers tight, how to work at the crown, to swipe his thumb just under the head's flared red curve before he drags down again in a rough, smearing stroke. He _means_ to be quiet, means to take the friction and hold it fast—but all his good intentions keep getting lost in the gaps between them, and he's not close yet, he _isn't_ , but heat's churning every vein, salt brimming at the backs of his teeth like a curse—

But Shiro's slowing again, grip going slack. "Keith," he manages, and Keith's head jerks up, a savage unthinking instinct.

" _Do it._ "

"Are you sure?"

Funny how that's still a question even as Shiro's working his belt off in a clink and snap, as a palm smoothes down the slope of his spine and a little tube comes tumbling across the sheets, uncapped—but the rest of the thought crackles out as Shiro's fist closes around his cock, pulling down. His teeth jump and grit; his fists knot along the sheets. "You're making it," Keith pants, even as he juts forward a little into the next lazy stroke, "kind of hard to _think_."

At once, Shiro stops; his grip unravels, pulls loose, leaving only a pulse to break and churn through Keith's ears in a foaming tide. He bites back a snarl. " _Shiro_."

"No," Shiro says, though his breaths are pulling heavy, too, one after another. His voice bells out, a chime tolling patience, conviction, intent—and one more thing, graveling low. "You're right. I need to know you want this. I can't take advantage of you, Keith. You have to ask me for it, and mean it."

"Please."

" _Tell_ me."

There's a pulse still caught in his temples, his waist and thighs, tangling in his ribs to knot and clump against the last knob of his spine. Keith shuts his eyes. He can't think. He won't. "Please," he says, and the breath grates through his teeth, "Shiro. I need you to fuck me, Shiro, _please_ —"

But Shiro knows that—knows him, and always has. What he wants is to hear Keith say it, raw and shaking and flushed with desperation. 

What he wants is to push Keith down.

Caution slams out the window as Shiro seizes him, hauls him close. A steel hand anchors his hip in place, black-fingered and merciless, while the other works him open, sloppy and fast, slicking into him without a beat's thought, pressing in two fingers and three, prying him apart and twisting until the sensation's stuttering down his thighs, until his elbows are scrabbling and jolting along the sheets without leverage, his throat straining just to gasp.

"All right?" Shiro says overhead, and Keith curses through the sheets. A laugh wafts up like smoke—but a thumb slides along the slant of his hipbone with it, wearing away the disgruntled ache before it settles. "Just checking."

There's no wait left between them, no fumbling uncertainty to take. A hand's still got him locked down, all their layers rucked out of the way as Shiro's hips drag flush along the backs of his thighs, as fingers shiver and drag apart until he's spread open enough to ache with the stretch. But there's no space to complain, no room to think—just a slow and heavy friction that fires up every nerve, that shatters in Keith's teeth to a wracking groan as the first thrust notches into him.

Shiro rolls his hips into it, slow at the start like he always is. He's dropped down, arm caging arm and his head bowed over Keith's nape, pressed close enough to feel every gutted, unthinking murmur, all the little sounds of someone past anything but feeling. Thrust pushes into thrust, and there's an ugly thrill to the ache: twinges raking down his back with the grit and slide of the hands settled against his hips, friction a dull throb through muscle and bone as he braces and strains, as rhythm builds into a guttering electricity up his spine.

"You're still," Shiro pants, "tense."

"I'm not—trying to be."

It's the wrong answer, he knows—twists dull through the pit of his stomach even before Shiro crushes a sigh into his shoulder. "I can stop," he says, and chagrin crystallizes out of heat, cold and gutting. "We don't have to—"

"That's not what I _said_."

Word after word tears through the haze, the felt _pulse_ of Shiro pressed deep into him, all their shivering heat coming undone. His lashes grit together, but Shiro keeps talking. "I can't read your mind, Keith," he says: steady, low, reasonable even as his hips jut forward into a rougher angle, as Keith bites his lip against a shudder. "Is that why you're mad?"

He's not. He is. There's a blur at the backs of his eyes like a lens slipped out of place, a fever that swells when he swallows, a shudder caught between his shoulder blades like the muscle's been bound into a spider-web. Shiro kisses him and he laughs, touches him and he arches, trusts him and looks to him and still—

_There's something wrong._

He can't think.

"I'm not," Keith manages, bewildered and raw. "I'm not m—" But impact scrapes white through his eyelids as the next thrust hits, deep enough to resound, fury and frustrated adrenaline tangling in a scorch-hot burst, buckling his knees as he arches, every last word shorted out to blinding sensation. " _God_."

"I guess not," Shiro says, ragged.

They keep going, just like that: hips snapping flush against the backs of Keith's thighs once and again, a mute, relentless friction that scores constellations across the backs of his eyelids. Another thrust sings up his spine, and Keith _bucks_ with it—stops again as a pang snaps through him, wrenching tight. Knuckles, he thinks, scraping along his scalp. Shiro's got a hand knotted in his hair, wringing harder for every shudder out of place, each violent jolt.

It takes time to focus through the haze. He's barely holding by the time Shiro braces up against him, as fingers stutter hot along wrist and hair, as he chokes off some obscene, incoherent confession into the slope of Keith's shoulder. 

There Shiro braces, body still caught against body, careful in the come-down as he is with everything else. His grip unravels; his hands settle along the sheets without sound, ginger in each landing, and meanwhile Keith's only conscious of each finger's absence, the bruise-bright throb where they'd pulled and pinned him, hard and panting and _close_ with heat spilling over in the pit of his stomach, aching as he drops back onto his heels, closing his own fist around his cock.

"No."

A hand wraps his wrist. Drowsy, Shiro leans in; he presses a kiss into the gleam of Keith's neck, the hard corner beneath an ear, languid and spent in his soft, bright aftermath. "I told you," he says, as Keith shudders in relief. "I've got you."

It takes a little fumbling for him to get going, but Shiro makes up for it, all unpracticed, breathless sounds: groaning with every shift, murmuring soft half-secrets into Keith's ear, defenseless trust in every syllable. Even half-dreaming, Shiro knows him—knows just how to hold on, grip smoothing and flexing until sensation comes welling up the base of his spine, flooding muscle and marrow the way a glass breaks, cresting, star by star, into a shattering flare.

"Good boy," Shiro murmurs, and a gasp cracks through him as Keith comes, caught and measured and thoroughly used, hips canting up with the sputtering white burst.

He crumples into the sheets face-first. 

Memory more than nerve tells him about the little moments after: the trailing stretch as Shiro crawls close, nosing along his shoulder and the salt-bitten line of his neck. But memory's a drowsy storyteller, dimming as a yawn rolls and blackens in his lungs, its colors and voices folding one into the other, saying: _this time—_

 _"All this time," Shiro'd whispered in the dark, eyes slung low. "You're the one that I remember, Keith—the one thing that's never changed on me. I know_ you _, but I don't know anything else anymore. I'm in no way fit to lead the team if I can't even trust the things I write down for myself—"_

_His fingers locked around Shiro's wrists. His head tipped close on a flushed exhale. The air dropped to stillness between them._

_"If you can't trust yourself," he'd said, "can you trust me?"_

Sound flickers.

Habit more than thought pushes him up to meet it. Out of a dream, Keith braces back onto his hands, blinking as the room sharpens from dust to light. Shiro's standing by the cot's side, tugging straight the lines of his shirt, pinching flat his vest's collar. Getting dressed.

"Where're you going?"

"I want to look over the maps on the bridge one more time." One pull and his belt winds into place. Bright bare skin snuffs out beneath black cloth and the flex of each glove. Shiro swings back a spare, clear-eyed look. "We're about to head into a new sector. If you're ready to take on some real responsibility, you can meet me in a few hours. We'll go over the plan together."

 _The plan._ Somewhere in the dark, between Oreispa's ceremonies and making it back to the ship, Shiro's already come up with what they need to do.

Keith knuckles one eye, then the other. Memory digs through the last week, comes back with a handful of blurry screens and lines; their lights sway and twine at the back of his head. "I didn't look at them much after the last mission," he says. "The flights didn't look like they'd be that bad."

"Oh."

"What?"

Shiro turns. The vest's stretched across his chest without a crease or split seam, his hair ruffled with no more than a stray breeze. In the doorway there's no trace of doubt, the rough desperation that he'd smeared into Keith's skin. "Nothing," he says, but his mouth twists—he laughs after a beat, and his head ducks down, thinking better of holding back. "You were leading the team for—weeks while I was gone. I thought you'd want to step up now. Especially since I can barely handle myself—but that's fine. I'll try to feed you extra instructions when you're out in the field."

Keith swallows. "I'll—"

But Shiro's striding over, and the world winks out, extinguishing all thought and real protest with it. Hollowness prickles under his skin, jarring, then staccato—overflows into white noise as Shiro sinks back onto the bed. He smells, incongruously, like a house burned clean: under the sweat and salt, there's a faint curl of cotton, the spice of their last dinner, his constant warm steel and nothing else. Time's slipped off his skin again; only the black ache rolling down Keith's shoulder tells any other story.

"Keith," he says with an instructor's gentleness, the kind of cradling they shouldn't need between them anymore. "If you need to stay down, I'll take your weight. Actually, this might be for the better: in the long run, the team probably can't afford a learning curve with new leadership right now." He hardly looks as he clasps Keith's shoulder, as his thumb traces a collarbone in faultless, quiet possession. "I've been thinking about this a lot. You've been rushing in even more than usual lately. You need to learn your limits before you put other people at risk."

"I'm—not. I'm trying, Shiro. I've been coming up with _plans_."

"Those aren't real plans," Shiro says, sharp and even. "And you know it. You're depending on strategies that stack the odds against us. Being reckless on your own's one thing. If you keep expecting the whole team to follow your lead, you're only going to endanger every member of Voltron."

His hands stiffen, knuckling to fists—but Shiro's already cupping his jaw to kiss him into a new shudder, a bright, slow kiss until his head tips back, yielding to the hunger of it, two survivors clinging to a driftwood intimacy. 

Shiro pulls back first, just a little. His sigh stings where it scrapes Keith's bruising-red lip. "That's not how I wanted to leave things with you tonight," he says, but he's lingering in spite of that, forehead bumping forehead, stroking skewed lines from his scalp to the edge of his nape. "You should get some sleep. Maybe you'll think better with more rest."

He's smiling still, all familiar rue and silver; but a new light's burning beneath his eyelids, like something glossed and papered over but never quite bound back. A light that Keith knows, dreaming or awake: lurid and violet as an alien warship.

No.

This isn't instinct—it's the silt of a bad dream that hasn't been shaken loose. Mud at the backs of his teeth and no more. In the deepest drifts of space, a single voice had called and the Black Lion'd answered. He'd tumbled into the hangar first, caught and held that staggering, winter-eaten frame with his own hands, and known. He'd found him. He had to.

He knows Shiro. He always will.

A kiss glances off his brow; Keith shuts his eyes. "You're so good to me, Keith," Shiro murmurs. The praise is deliberate, and Keith shivers with the aftershocks of his laugh. The bed jounces once as he rises. "Thanks for—all of this. I don't know what I'd be without you."

 _This_. He twists in reflex, and at once every black stroke pulses awake, a maze of fault-lines etched into skin. He'll do it again, he thinks through the dull pounding, for the next mission and the next. They've crossed galaxies to find each other. This is nothing he can't take.

Alone, Keith curls towards the wall, rolls his shoulders just to feel it: raw static churning down his spine, marked-up and slick, bruised and spent. Every ache a new claim of possession.

He is selfish. He is reckless. He is a risk, and Shiro needs better. This is the least of what he can give.

"Yeah," Keith says, as the lights evaporate. "Me neither."

#  *****


End file.
